Friday, 22 July 2016

“Tremain.” The desk shook under my head as something thick and solid made violent contact with it.

“Wha-huh?” I blinked, sucking in air like the wind had been knocked out of me. It hadn’t. The ecology textbook in my face shook slightly under the hand still gripping it. Why had I fallen asleep again? “Sorry, Professor Watkins.”

“Don’t be sorry just wake the Hell up, Tremain. You can’t afford to fail the final.” Watkins turned on his heel and paced back to the front of the room. “Everything I lecture about is important to you, not me. I learned this stuff thirty years ago. Go ahead and fail, all of you, like Tremain is going to. You know what I call that?”

The pair of giggling girls behind me snickered something about flat-bottomed Professors. They had a point, but I couldn’t focus enough on it to even crack a smile. The tap and squeak of chalk on the board made my ears feel like they’d been making out with ice picks. I squinted at the words, trying to make sense of the chalky squiggles. One giant snowfall and I couldn’t concentrate. I could barely stay awake.

“For you miserable louts who can’t be bothered to look at the board, that says job security.” Watkins tapped the chalk under each word as he said it. “Mine, not yours. I just get paid more when you repeat my class. Exam’s on Monday, so you have today and the weekend to prepare. Get a study buddy. Get your notes and syllabus. Get it under control. Pass so I don’t have to look at you next semester. Get out of here and hit some books.”

I leaned down to pick up my backpack. A minute later, I sat up again, snorting out the tail end of a snore and wiping a thin string of drool off my cheek. Except it wasn’t a minute later. It was dark outside and the.....

Friday, 15 July 2016

I just moved. Not from one town to another, but from one end of the couch to the other end. I don't usually sit on this side, but I'm trying to listen in on the apartment next door. I'm rather particular about where I sit because I like thing to be to the left of me. I need to be able to see what's there.

The walls of our two bedroom apartment are thin and covered in the standard off-white paint of a rental unit, but I still can't make out the words on the other side. I can only decipher the pitch of the voices.

Friday, 8 July 2016

Life through a phone is a lie. Edie imagined the process like a diagram from physics lessons, the one on that Pink Floyd album cover - a beam of white light refracting in a prism, splintering and fanning out as a rainbow.

I mean, how much artifice, she wondered, was crammed into one appealing photograph? She gazed at its seductive fictions in the slightly greasy, warm slab of screen in her palm as she queued at the hotel bar.

Activity in the room whirled around her, messy unkempt sweaty reality, soundtracked by The Supremes 'Where Did Our Love Go?' In this still life, everything was forever image managed and perfect.

Friday, 1 July 2016

Frixco de Fiennes scurried across the cobbles into the shelter of the gatehouse in a drizzling dusk as miserable as wet ash. It matched his mood, especially when he saw the dark shape lurking under the cullis, bouncing slightly and swaying left to right: Aggie, nursing her brain.

He sighed and went to them, peeling off his hat and beating the drops from it.

'Aggie,' he said wearily. 'You should not have met me here.'

'None can hear. The guards are in their wee cubbyhole,' she retorted tartly. 'Asleep.'

Friday, 24 June 2016

Harper Grayson had seen lots of people burn on TV, everyone had, but the first person she saw burn for real was in the playground behind the school.

Schools were closed in Boston and some other parts of Massachusetts, but here in New Hampshire they were still open. There had been cases in New Hampshire, but only a few. Harper had heard that half a dozen patients were being held in a secure wing of Concord Hospital, looked after by a medical team outfitted in full-body protective gear, every nurse armed with a fire extinguisher.

Harper was holding a cold compress to the cheek of a first-grader named.....